


The Funeral

by blythechild



Category: Original Work
Genre: Advice, Awkward Conversations, Developing Friendships, Families of Choice, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-24 03:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2566289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an effort to close seemingly unsolvable serial crimes, the FBI has taken the extreme action of creating a special unit staffed entirely by killers. It is Agent Sam Anoyle's thankless task to run the team, prevent them from killing one another, and save her flagging career all while attempting to clear cases that every other investigator has written off. <br/>[This summary is an overview of the entire story, not of the individual entries that will be posted as they are written - see Story Notes for entry-specific info]</p><p>This story is an original work and I assert creative copyright over the names, characters and events contained herein. This work contains adult themes and graphic violence and should not be read by those under the age of 18.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Funeral

**Author's Note:**

> Sam Anoyle is burying a friend when her subordinate, Henry Klaxton, shows up uninvited. She has a hard time deciding if the act is charming or just plain creepy.
> 
> This interlude happens before the events in [There Will Be Blood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/827448).

Ernest had been found at home two weeks after the neighbors reported a strange odor. A week after the police report, a Welfare Check team had tried and failed to gain entry and then were forced to get a court order to bust into his apartment. There was a backlog of requests, so the order had taken four more days to attain. By the time authorities had a legal right to see if he was all right, Ernest had been dead on the floor of his bathroom for almost a month. And since he’d spent all of that wasted time decomposing above ground, no one felt inclined to reschedule his funeral for a day with better weather, which was why the mourners risked lightning strikes as they huddled under umbrellas in the grave yard, their shoes filling up with rainwater.

Not that there were many mourners for Ernest Wennberg - just some old cronies from his days at the New York and Baltimore PDs, and some shifty characters who may have been his CIs at some point. Or maybe they were just scoundrels he owed money to, hoping for an opportunity to branch out into grave robbery.

 _Good luck with that_ , Sam thought as she shifted her weight and felt her heels sink deeper into the muck surrounding the gaping hole in the earth. The only thing worth stealing from Ernest was his intellect and that was already long gone; the rest was just what he needed to survive. He’d always lived as if his body were an afterthought.

Lightning flashed across the sky and a thunderous boom shook the scene but the priest carried on valiantly, his soaked robes flapping like menacing wings. She didn’t think Ernest was Catholic but the rep from the Benevolent Association said it was listed in his personnel file, and so here they were absorbing homilies and hurricane rain for the sake of Ernest’s eternal soul. She wondered if Ernest had selected a religion just so he could get the last laugh.

The wind changed direction suddenly and the mourners collectively bent their umbrellas against the gale’s new onslaught. Sam’s dress tuliped around her knees with the gust despite being soaked through, and she gritted her teeth at her instinct to wear it on such a shitty day. It wasn’t as if she was a dress girl to begin with. Her grip on her umbrella tightened as she made up her mind just to get through this and focus on the large glass of scotch that she’d enjoy afterwards in a quiet, dry place. She strained to hear the priest over the wind and ended up hearing the rhythmic squishing of footsteps coming up behind her. She looked sideways and was shocked to her bones to find Henry Klaxton, hunched against the storm and soaked to the skin, standing next to her.

Klax nodded, rain streaming down the hair plastered to his skull. “Sam.”

She stood silently and stared as the wind buffeted them. When she became aware that her mouth was hanging open, she clamped it shut with an audible click and struggled to assert some of her hard-won authority. Tolerating Klax’s unique blend of edginess and insubordination wasn’t something she had patience for outside of the office. Some things ought to be off limits, even for a psychopath. She’d be damned if he was going to play one of his stupid psychological games at _her friend’s_ funeral. In Baltimore. Honestly, he looked as if he’d _walked_ from D.C. …

“What are you doing here, Klax?”

“Doing what you do when someone dies: you bury them, and then stand around and think about it.”

“Did you know Ernest?” Sam’s voice was sharp and louder than was decent for a funeral, but she had zero endurance for his glibness. Not today. She shouldn’t be forced to protect herself from his scrutiny _here_.

“No…”

“Then why do you care?” She sensed the other mourners peering at her from under their umbrellas; her ‘otherness’ and now her lack of decorum adding fuel to their prejudice. Perhaps they were hoping the nice white man would escort the unpleasant brown person away…

“Fundamentally, I don’t care.” Klax sighed and then straightened his shoulders as he looked at her, blinking against the rain. “But you do.”

She went tight as piano wire all over and, seeing that reflected in her, Klax ducked his head to clear the edge of her umbrella and stepped closer.

“I didn’t come to mock you, Sam.” Rain from her umbrella streamed down Klax’s neck and under his collar. He shook a little and then backed out into the tumult again. “The horrible weather would’ve sucked all the fun out of it if I had.”

She stared again, questioning his motivation. She was uncomfortable when his actions became opaque. It always made her want to palm her side arm, just in case. Klax was staring at the casket and the flapping priest with mild interest. Sam decided to follow suit for lack of a better plan; clearly, Klax wasn’t going anywhere.

“Your magnanimity is boundless.”

She heard Klax huff beside her, the cloud from his breath living for a split second in her peripheral vision before being lost to the swirl of wind and rain.

“I wouldn’t have done it anyway.” He murmured. “Even if the weather had been clear.”

She glanced back at him then though he didn’t turn to meet her stare. He sort of slouched, hands tucked into the pockets of his pants, the rain wallpapering his suit to his slight frame. He seemed the very antithesis of threatening, even with the telling bulge of his FBI-issued weapon on his hip under his jacket. Sometimes it was difficult to believe that he was the same person who’d been suspected of so many crimes… but then again, perhaps it was that very disbelief that had helped him escape from so many investigations. Sam had to remember that Henry Klaxton was a master manipulator. That was his primary contribution to the team: a headcase who could relate to both killers and civilians with equal affinity. He was so good at it that sometimes she forgot herself and drifted towards his congeniality without thinking. The others couldn’t hold a candle to him, really, which meant he wasn’t liked by anyone and, ironically, placed him on the outside of every social grouping he found himself in despite his skills. Occasionally, she would experience a momentary twinge of pity for him but then realized that he’d never show her anything that he hadn’t orchestrated for effect beforehand. And her walls would go back up. Still, she couldn’t figure out what he got out of being here.

“How did you even know about this?”

The edge of his mouth lifted in a small smile. “Here’s where I get creepy and you threaten to shoot one of my balls off: I hacked your Bureau email.” He turned slightly, still smirking, and waited. “What? No righteous umbrage? No furious promise to have me locked up in a looney bin and doped to the gills for the rest of my natural life?”

“Oh, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?” She dismissed. “It would just be boring to act it out. Besides, I’m sure you’ve learned your lesson - my work email is as stale as week-old bread.”

“You’re not wrong there.”

“But do it again, and I’m claiming that ball you just offered up. That’s a promise.”

“See? This is why I’m so fond of you: the civilized conversations.”

“I’m your boss, Klax, and a surprisingly tolerant one, all things considered.” She tried to shut down his amusement with the most severe glare she could conjure up. “If you keep bending what few rules we have until they break… if this little Bureau experiment goes sideways, your immediate future gets very bleak very fast. You all end up incarcerated, institutionalized, or worse. And I’ll end up jobless and untouchable in the law enforcement community. I’m the only one standing between you guys and all of that - I’m the only one who gives a last, quixotic fuck about whether the Aberrant Crimes Division succeeds or not. You’re too smart a guy to have failed to notice this, which is why you need to grow up and quit provoking a system that will squash you like a bug the moment you become more trouble than you’re worth. You need to learn the dimensions of your own insignificance, Klax. Do it now - that’s the only advice I’ll ever give you.”

The curl at the corner of his mouth subsided, and Sam had a momentary twinge that he _might_ have taken her seriously. For all of his Machiavellian efforts, Klax was a boy trapped in a man’s body; he delighted in being provocative, he preened his intelligence and sang froid often at the cost of the big picture. If she were hunting him, _that’s_ how she’d catch him, and she wondered if he was even self-aware enough to realized that she’d already figured that out about him.

Klax turned away from her, face into the wind, and crossed his arms over his chest as if putting a period at the end of their back-and-forth. _Oh, pouting… that’s mature._ Sam took a step towards Klax and lifted her umbrella to shelter his six-foot frame. Just because he was a psychopath didn’t mean that she had to be…

“Don’t bother.” He raised a hand to stop her. “There comes a point when you can’t get any wetter. That moment sailed past about ten minutes ago.”

Sam stepped back, eyes forward to the priest. He was ramping up the rhetoric, which either meant he was nearing the finish line or was eager to get out of the storm. She shifted her weight and felt a new, unpleasant squelch in her left shoe - she’d probably have to throw them away when this was over. 

“How well did you know him?” Klax huffed as the wind changed direction again.

Sam’s face flushed as she stared at the casket. Whenever she thought about Ernest dying, she imagined him buying it in a botched convenience store hold-up or some ill-advised fight with a mugger. She never pictured him having a stroke on the can, dying paralyzed and face down on his bathroom tiles with his pants around his ankles. The ignominy of it frightened her the most - perhaps that would be her story in forty years. At least Ernest had a few people who cared. Not enough to check on him regularly - and that’s where her guilt kicked in - but enough to make this damned performance worthwhile. In forty years, would anyone care if she went missing? Would anyone stand in the rain for her?

“Not well enough to realize that he’d been dead for a month.” She didn’t mean to say it aloud.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Klax said, as if he’d read her thoughts. “He must’ve meant something. Who was he to you?”

Sam sighed. She thought about her seventeen-year-old self peering at Ernest as he stood on the stoop of her walk-up, staring at the envelope of hundreds that he held out to her with grim determination. Her dad had been dead for six weeks and she was about to be evicted - she must have looked like some fragile, feral thing to him. He’d just waved the money at her in frustration and said ‘Fuck you - don’t waste my time. This is how it’s gonna be from now on.’. She thought that the money meant she’d have to screw him, or worse, but it didn’t work out like that. Ernest just kept showing up with money, and brutal advice, and invective-laced conversations that she never asked for. 

“Ernest worked with my father in the NYPD. After Dad died… Ernest just _became_ Dad.” She couldn’t believe that she was telling Klax any of this.

“He must’ve really cared about you…” Klax mumbled. “To take on that kind of responsibility.”

Sam snorted ungraciously. “Ernest _hated_ people - I mean, really hated them. He always said that if you ever did anything nice for someone, they’d find a way to make you pay for it forever. The irony was that his hatred of the world made him an excellent cop - he was never distracted by emotion, never conned by a cunning lie…”

Unlike her, standing in the rain getting emotionally conned by Henry Klaxton, she thought. Ernest would have yelled at her until he was hoarse if he’d seen it.

The priest finished the homilies and was back to the call-and-response of common prayer, so she assumed that they were nearly done and she could escape soon.

“If you didn’t hate people so much yourself, you’d have probably liked him.” She said it without thinking and felt Klax turn to face her in the rain. “And I’ll never know why he did anything for me. I just know that I wouldn’t have made it without him. That’s all.”

She felt him staring at her; staring with those eyes that were so dark they sometimes looked black, flicking with an alien intensity. Just when she thought she couldn’t stand the scrutiny, he spoke. “Are you religious, Sam?”

“No. Whatever defined Ernest ended when he stopped breathing and his heart stopped pumping blood and his brain ceased to send out electrical impulses.”

“That was over a month ago.”

“I know.” She snapped. She was starting to regret not having told Klax to fuck off and be done with it.

“So why are you here?”

She rounded on him then and saw that he seemed genuinely curious about her response. She’d expected his knowing smirk and his condescension, but not this. She choked back whatever knee-jerk response she had teed up and thought about whether he deserved an answer at all.

“I buried my father, and now I’m burying the man who stepped in to do the job afterwards.” She measured out the words carefully, feeling the weight of them on her tongue before she spoke. “There’s no one else now - this means I’m alone in the world.” 

The wind gusted and threatened the hemline of her dress. She lowered a hand to her side to trap the fabric against her leg. “Maybe he didn’t care one way or the other, but I did. And I’m not… I _can’t_ let go yet.”

She waited for the Klaxton rebuff, his cold analysis or his silent judgment, but instead she felt fingers pull her hand away from her side and curl around hers. When she looked up, he was just watching her, rivulets of rainwater streaming down his dress shirt and along the arms of his jacket.

“Am I doing it right?” He asked eventually.

She almost laughed aloud in disbelief: Klax didn’t need lessons in social mimicry. She’d seen him charm and obfuscate his way past the defenses of almost every kind of personality type. He was a chameleon and it was simultaneously the locus of his value and her continuing distrust. It was always an act. Always. He never meant any of it. So why would he ask when they both knew he could fake it?

Sam looked down at their hands as rain streamed over and around their fingers. Hers had reflexively curled around his and it left her momentarily lost.

“You don’t really have to ask, do you?” _Why are you here, Klax? Why are you doing this?_

“Good. I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. It’s important that I get this right.” He said quietly, almost overpowered by the ‘amens’ of the mourners as the priest finished up the Lord’s Prayer. “Especially since I ruined a suit for it.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I never kid about my wardrobe. You should know that by now.”

He was still holding her hand; their palms were getting clammy from the rain and the contact. She waited for him to shrug the whole scene away, but he didn’t. He just watched the mourners take turns throwing handfuls of mud onto the casket lid. 

“When I figure out the game you’re playing,” She stepped closer and acted as if their conversation were more familiar and less threatening than it actually was. “You’ll regret that you did this, Henry.”

He looked back, eyes widening, but otherwise maintaining his apparent level of soaked amiability. “There’s no game, Samsara. Not this time. I promise.”

“You know that I can’t possibly take that statement at face value.”

She looked on in disbelief as a vivid flush coloured his cheeks. “Yes, I get that.” He shrugged and trained his gaze on her feet. The funeral party had begun moving towards the parking lot with undignified speed, the crow-like priest leading the charge. Soon it was just her, and Klax, and the swampy trench that held the memory of an irascible bastard whom she loved. 

She needed to find a way to move. She’d run out of excuses to stand there, but she couldn’t seem to locate the will. Even the lure of that glass of scotch and maybe a warm fire and eighty-sixing her crappy shoes weren’t enough to motivate her. She just closed her eyes and listened to the rain tapping against the casket lid and the wind whistling through the cedars nearby.

_I’m sorry it took us a month to have this conversation, Ernest…_

Eventually, she felt her hand fall to her side and remembered that Klax was still there. She sucked in a breath, pinned him with a glare, and refortified her defenses. It was disturbing that she had forgotten about his presence and relaxed. Perhaps he did need some social schooling if he hadn’t realized he should have left already.

“Your shoes are an insult to both practicality and fashion, Sam.” 

He ran his fingers through the hair that hung before his eyes and smiled. It was a very ‘Klax’ thing to do - to insult and charm at the same time - and she almost smiled back at the return to familiarity. Then, with his view cleared, he stepped closer letting the tips of his fingers land along the small of her back. 

“But your dress is lovely.” He whispered next to her ear before retreating into the rain taking his wandering hand with him. “Don’t spoil it by standing in this storm proving to yourself that you won’t let go. Anyone who knows you at all can see that already, and Ernest is beyond caring.”

He turned and walked away, not waiting for a response. She watched him go, thin body bent against the wind leaving deep, wet footprints as he struggled to gain traction in the mud. It took him a long time to make it to the roadway at the edge of the cemetery and she just watched his progress without thinking a single thought. When he reached firmer ground, he began jogging like a large, gangly kid who was late for something. The weirdness of it snapped her out of her hypnosis, and it was then that her brain catalogued where he’d touched her and how. 

Boy, was she going to have to reassert some boundaries at the office on Monday. And she _still_ didn’t know why he’d shown up in the first place. But at least he’d admitted to the computer hacking on his own and she wouldn’t be forced to use the keystroke report she’d received after IT installed the spyware on his electronic resources. She enjoyed cloaking her power in anonymity and giving the team the freedom to make their own mistakes. It had been one of the last bits of advice Ernest had given her when she voiced her doubts about helming ‘Freak Division’: _Have a back-up plan, and a back-up for the back-up, Sammy. Don’t let ‘em get a leg over on ya. Shadowbox with ‘em all you like, but don’t let ‘em within a mile of your soft spots._

“I’ll do my best, Ernest.” She whispered to the rain. 

It was going to be more difficult with Klax. She hadn’t managed to cow him like the rest, but a new plan was forming itself in her mind that might bring him in line willingly. It would require delicacy and caution on her part, otherwise the situation ran the risk of becoming messy and dangerous very quickly and she had _no_ intention of allowing Henry Klaxton that sort of effect in her life. 

Sam decided that she’d had her fill of rain and introspection for a while and began picking her way through half-filled footprints back to the parking lot. Several times, her heels sunk into the ground with enough suction to send her lurching forward without them. After the third try and a string of curses that would’ve made Ernest smile, she ripped her shoes from the mud and proceeded forward barefoot dumping the offending heels in the nearest trashcan. Henry was right: her shoes were just rubbish.


End file.
